The Zotero project is looking to hire a full-time, contract developer to help extend the Zotero ecosystem. At first you will work primarily on a specific new tool. If all goes well, we’d hope and expect that you’d be interested in remaining a full-time paid member of the Zotero team longer term.

Initially, you’ll be designing and building a pluggable server-side tool to bridge the Zotero API and external services — think IFTTT for research data. You’ll be building both the base program and one or more sample plugins to help guide the tool’s development and serve as examples for other users of the tool.

Beyond the initial contract, you would begin working on other parts of Zotero, with the ability to focus on the things that interested you. That might mean improving the client or website, extending the API, optimizing the cloud infrastructure, or building back-end services to power new features. As part of a small team, you’d have responsibility over core components of the project and the freedom to find creative solutions to challenging problems. Most importantly, you’d participate in a vibrant global open-source community with amazing community developers and passionate users.

The Zotero development team meets periodically in person, but you’ll primarily be working remotely, communicating with Zotero developers and users via chat rooms, forums, mailing lists, and GitHub. Our hours are flexible and variable: we might be debating a feature request at 1 p.m. or deploying a major upgrade at 1 a.m.

Experience building user-friendly front-end software used by many people or the back-end services powering it, or both

Please send a cover letter and résumé, including relevant programming projects and experience, to jobs@zotero.org with subject line “Contract Developer”. We will begin considering applications immediately and continue until the position is filled. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

We’re now offering unlimited storage subscriptions! There’s no longer any need to estimate how much storage you’ll need for your research projects in advance. Unlimited storage is priced at just $120 per year, equivalent to only $10 per month.

All current individual subscribers to storage plans 25GB and greater have received automatic upgrades to unlimited plans. We’re also offering an extra year of unlimited storage to those large-plan users who paid in the last 90 days. Subscribers to our discontinued 10GB plans have the option of remaining in those subscriptions as long as they desire.

Subscribers can still choose the 2GB and 6GB plans, offered at $20 and $60 per year, respectively.

We’re excited to announce that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded $360,000 to fund two years of research into altmetrics to be conducted at the University of Montreal, Indiana University, and George Mason University. The Zotero project’s first phase of participation will involve the aggregation and delivery of anonymized datasets to allow our research partners in Montreal and Bloomington to compare readership across a range of metrics, including commercial databases, social media, and reference management software. This project’s second phase is even more exciting: Zotero will put into production a preliminary public API that returns anonymous readership counts when fed universal identifiers (e.g. ISBN, DOI), enabling bibliometric research and integration into third-party apps.

Our partners at the University of Montreal, led by Vincent Larivière and Stefanie Haustein, and at Indiana University, led by Cassidy Sugimoto, will analyze the readership data supplied by Zotero and provide feedback regarding its quality to help us refine our aggregation algorithm. The resulting research will improve our understanding of social media’s value in scholarly communication and shed light on the actual meaning of various altmetric scoring systems.

We’re delighted to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $440,000 to fund a two-year collaboration between Penn State and George Mason University to develop and assess new Zotero functionality for tracking, organizing, and archiving scholarly publications.

Key new Zotero features will include:

Feeds in the Zotero application. Users will be able to add RSS and Atom feeds to track their favorite scholarly journals and easily grab new publications by simply dragging them to their Zotero libraries as desired.

Integration with institutional repositories. The Zotero team will work with the developers behind Penn State’s ScholarSphere institutional repository (IR) to allow Penn State faculty, students, and staff to deposit self-authored works directly into the IR from Zotero. A pluggable architecture will enable other institutional repositories to establish similar connections with Zotero.

The IR integration will rely on two key new Zotero technologies to be developed under this grant: a push-based API and a standalone service that connects Zotero to other web applications. Working together, these two new features will enable a range of actions in third-party web services triggered by changes in Zotero libraries, much like an IFTTT for Zotero.

The Penn State team will be led by Ellysa Stern Cahoy, an education librarian who has already conducted extensive research into how faculty manage and archive scholarly communication. She will build on her research to assess how this new Zotero functionality helps humanities scholars to refine their research practices.

Registration is now open for a unique, one-day Advanced Zotero Workshop at the Harvard Kennedy School on November 8, 2013.

The workshop is aimed at scholars who have been using Zotero for a while and would like to get even more out of the software, receive specific advice on any issues they encounter, and get all of their questions answered. Registration will remain limited to eight participants, who will benefit from a workshop targeted to their needs and interest.

The cost to attend the workshops is $250. Sign up while there is still space!

The workshops will be conducted by Sebastian Karcher, one of Zotero’s most active community developers, who has a wealth of experience using, supporting, and developing Zotero. Contact him at karcher [at] u.northwestern.edu with any questions about the workshop, or if you would like to host an advanced user or Zotero trainer workshop at your own institution.